Notes about the collages

Introduction
  Behavioural Sink was the first collage that I made. I had been working with the screen printing medium until a burglar stole the photographic equipment essential for the technique that I used. Although I liked screen printing for its interesting aesthetic possibilities I did not care for the smell, solvents, cleaning up and the need for a proper ventilated studio. I decided that the ideal medium should require a space no larger than a kitchen table and should be varied and open ended in possibilities. Collage seemed perfect.

Technique
  The materials that I was drawn to would more readily fit the description of mixed media than collage but the result would always be figurative. To give the dramatically foreshortened table lamp in Behavioural Sink the glossy 1970's look meant making it from solder wire glued to perspex. The original influence was Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass on which he used fuse wire glued with mastic gum to glass - an idea prompted by the presence of fuse wire on top of every building's fuse board.

  Behavioural Sink was the first time I used fret work, the title along the top of the picture is a very carefully sawn and chiseled font and it was also the first occasion that I carved into the surface of the plywood (where the red couch has smashed through the wall beside the mural). Any material that could be sawn, cut, moulded, glued, sown or nailed could be considered.

Themes
  Behavioural Sink is fairly typical of the sort of issues that I was interested in at the time. I believe the title is a term coined in the 1980's and is a sociological description of dysfunction, the details of which I don't remember. A companion work to Behavioural Sink titled The Plains of Id borrowed that wonderfully evocative phrase from Reyner Banham's book about the development and architecture of Los Angeles.

  If these themes sound bleak the reason is that I felt that socially the 1980's was a souring period of our recent history and it is reflected in other titles such as The Threat Assessors a phrase describing experts who earn their money from assessing the level of danger to the wealthy and to celebrities. Later work featured more sexual imagery, one series explored Brigitte Bardot in the 1950's (And God created Woman, for example). However, the series shown on this site abandon such overt themes for a subtler meditation of figures in a landscape. Check out the collage tour page for summaries of these pictures.

Imagery
  For several years I regularly had a camera mounted on a tripod in front of the television and if a typical B grade, late movie caught my attention then I would be ready with the cable release. The design of Behavioural Sink is one of the consequences of this visual sampling, it was sourced from an early James Bond film. The image quality would initially suffer from a badly tuned black and white TV set and any wilful depredations that I inflicted on it in order to get a sufficient breakdown. Some of the imagery that I used was barely legible but that was necessary in order to stimulate the imagination and in affect to make the images my own.